It’s Official: Dave Eggers is as Edgy as Formica

While the Complete Review quite rightly lays into Tanenhaus for his despicable fiction antics over the year (no brownies for you!), Dave Eggers’ continued irrelevance shows off its true colors in a New Yorker review (courtesy of the Rake, a classier bloke than me). Beyond Eggers’ remarkable ignorance of Broadway (or even off or off-off Broadway), his lack of appreciation for Life of Brian, and his narrow view of Python as merely “fourth-wall” humor resides the more troubling dismissal of Doestoevsky’s Notes from Underground as “a very weird book, meandering.” We hate to judge a person solely on their cultural tastes (well maybe not), but we have to ask. This is the man who’s supposed to shepherd “indepedent” publishing?

Post navigation

4 Comments

C’mon, Ed… Eggers says, “That one didnít get under our skin at that time the same way” – “at that time” being when he and his friends were teenagers. I would say the same: as a teenager, I loved Holy Grail and Meaning of Life, but I didn’t get into Brian until my 20s (not even sure I saw it until then). In his review of the new stage show he calls Brian “ninety minutes of vicious and brilliant heresy”, which doesn’t sound like lack of appreciation to me.

As for the “fourth wall” stuff – he doesn’t say it’s all that Python did, just talks about it as one of the things they did. And that comment on Doestoevsky didn’t read like a dismissal to me, just a comment on how writing and reading styles have changed since his day.

thank you for being one of the three people left in american letters who aren’t infatuated with dave eggers. for that, you get another subscriber to your blog. now we just need to track down that third guy…

I don’t think any one person can shepherd independent publishing. That doesn’t mean his writing won’t be relevant. I’m not a fan of the stream-of-consciousness style myself, but I find the brand of humor he puts into it is really good. Though he doesn’t finish any of his lengthier pieces well.

Although, I’m of the opinion that the only thing that I think will ruin the independent publishing idea could be bloggers.